10/11/2008

Arcontech Releases AXE version 3.4 for spread betting with a raft of new features

London, 10th November 2008.  Arcontech, the wholly owned subsidiary of KTS plc has released version 3.4 of its AXE trading platform, aimed at brokers offering financial derivatives trading, such as Contracts for Difference (CFDs), to the retail market. Version 3.4 contains many new features, now fully supporting spread betting as well as CFDs.

A significant enhancement is the inclusion of a new interface, written in Microsoft’s .net environment using Arcontech’s proven CityVision DNA real-time API. This utilises the real-time CityVision infrastructure to greatly enhance the performance for trade and order handling as well as significantly improving the on-screen presentation and ease of use for front office dealers.

Optional advanced features are also available, such as a web-delivered application that allows client agents and introducing broker partners of the primary broker to trade on behalf of multiple individual clients quickly and efficiently, and a ‘trading clubs’ facility that allows bulk trades to be conducted as a single action and allocated in defined proportions across multiple accounts.

The new version was released in October and is already live with two customers.

Commenting on the new developments Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech said: “We continue to invest significantly in AXE and have undertaken the latest phases in response to and in close liaison with our AXE clients.  We have further exciting developments on the product road map and believe AXE to be the best off-the-shelf product for the market at the current time.  Our ability to customise the ‘look and feel’ and to incorporate specific requirements makes the product a natural choice for firms looking at these lucrative markets”

15/09/2008

Knowledge Technology Solutions plc (“KTS” or “the Company”)

Arcontech/KTS Completes Integration with Equiduct feeds

KTS is pleased to announce that it’s wholly owned subsidiary Arcontech, a real-time software specialist providing products and bespoke systems for collection, processing, distribution and presentation of time-sensitive financial markets data, has completed the introduction of new feed handlers to integrate Equiduct’s data into its CityVision product suite.  This gives customers’ access to the real-time VBBO (Volume-weighted Best Bid/Offer), hybrid order book and trade feeds from the new pan-European stock exchange via off-the-shelf CityVision products, such as Excelerator for real-time data in Microsoft Excel and the CityVision Calculation Engine, which offers high speed data processing to support price comparisons and algorithm trading decisions.

The new development will also provide access to the Equiduct feed via powerful CityVision DNA (dot net api) module, which allows developers using Microsoft’s .net languages rapidly to create high performance applications very simply.  It will also enable CityVision to publish Equiduct data directly onto the Reuters RMDS platform instead of via vendors, thus considerably reducing the latency for delivery.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech, commented:

“This is another example of the benefits of our independent market data platform components approach. Deploying our FIX engine interface and feed server API greatly reduces development time for basic feed handling and, once that is done correctly, the data is immediately available to the rest of our components. We are now ready, well ahead of the Equiduct live date, to work with firms wishing to take advantage of integration with the new exchange.”

28/07/2008

Arcontech, a real-time software specialist providing products and bespoke systems for collection, processing, distribution and presentation of time-sensitive financial markets data, today announces the appointment, with effect from 24 June, of Chandra Dass as Business Development Manager.

Chandra joins the Company with eighteen years of experience in Business Development and Sales roles at a number of blue chip technology and financial sector, including Tenfore, Misys and IBM. His most recent role was at Tenfore Systems Limited, an independent provider of financial market data and technology solutions, where he built a considerable pipeline of new business opportunities.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech, commented:

“I am delighted to welcome Chandra to the team at an extremely exciting time for the Company. The business is developing rapidly with increasing numbers of firms turning to Arcontech in response to recent forced upgrades and price increases from competitors. The additional features and benefits that CityVision offers, at competitive rates, in combination with Chandra’s experience and contact base will position us well to capitalise on these opportunities.”

10/06/2008

Knowledge Technology Solutions Plc (“KTS”), a leading provider of real-time data distribution and trading systems, has agreed to sell its Market Terminal subscription service information base to Ionic Information in order to cut operating costs and to develop the Arcontech CityVision trading and market data software businesses.

Alpha Terminal is owned by Ionic Information – an established market leader in the private investor software sector and a growing force in the professional marketplace.

Andrew Miller, CEO of KTS, said:

“Market Terminal is an excellent product but lacks market penetration. Its high overheads have been a continual drain on finances so we have decided to focus on our solutions business which offers better opportunities to drive the Group’s growth and profitability. Our solutions business builds on the strategic acquisition of Arcontech and now comprises three main thrusts: firstly, growing the successful CityVision real-time middleware business; secondly, the new CityVision “AXE” retail trading system; and thirdly, “CityVision Direct” which capitalises on KTS’ Market Terminal technology, to deliver streaming market data direct to end-users, as we have done with the successful web portal for Equiduct.

“Having held discussions with all of the leading terminal providers, Ionic demonstrated that they had the product, enthusiasm and commitment to best serve our clients going forward. They had already been providing stiff competition to our offering and have worked with us to provide clients with a very straight-forward migration.”

Martin Stamp, Managing Director of Ionic, said:

“The UK-focused investment and trading sector is a key growth market for us and we are delighted to have this opportunity to offer Alpha Terminal to KTS clients. We are confident that this deal represents an excellent outcome for Ionic, KTS and its clients.”

11/03/2008

KTS Plc, a leading provider of web-delivered real-time market data solutions, has created a new website to emphasise its new focus following the recent acquisition of Arcontech.

The site highlights the benefits of both KTS and Arcontech products and promotes specific specialities such as Contracts for Difference (CFDs) trading and enterprise level data distribution systems. Users can now navigate faster and more effectively around the site, enabling them more easily to find suitable products and services from KTS/Arcontech.

Andrew Miller, CEO of KTS Plc commented: “KTS and Arcontech have world class technology. The commercial viability of using the combined technologies is evidenced by the recent selection of KTS by Borse Berliner for its Equiduct web portal. Our new website provides a starting point for those seeking enterprise level solutions in many areas of real-time data acquisition, distribution and on-line trading”.

The website is available from both http://www.arcontech.com and http://www.ktsplc.com

03/03/2008

Following its successful implementation of Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet market data platform, Tradition Group (http://www.traditiongroup.com/uk) has extended this system to manage contributions to Bloomberg in London. The migration of the Bloomberg contributions from the previous system was achieved in a matter of days.

The Tokyo hub has also been rolled-out, to support local contributions to a number of vendors in that region. The deployment, achieved within a week, is integrated with the London hub and provides seamless data transfer between the locations. Other data collection hubs throughout the world are in the process of roll-out. Currently the data platform collects data from 10 offices globally with further expansion planned for 2008.

The StarNet system collects data from various sources, including in-house trading systems and numerous Excel spreadsheets. It enables managed real-time publishing to many destinations, including Reuters, Bloomberg and Tradition’s RMDS platform, as well as to other global offices.

Commenting on these improvements Dominique Velter, Strategic Marketing Director at Tradition said: “We chose the Arcontech system over competitors because we were convinced that it would meet our growing business requirements quickly and efficiently.”

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech, added: “It’s great to be involved with a dynamic and forward-thinking firm like Tradition. They recognised the potential for cost and operational efficiency offered by StarNet and have implemented an innovative architecture using our off-the-shelf products.”

27/02/2008

Arcontech – a leading developer of real-time market data software and wholly owned subsidiary of KTS plc – today unveiled CityVision dna the latest addition to its multi-award-winning CityVision software suite.

The new component, short for CityVision dot net api, allows software engineers using Microsoft’s .net development environment to write applications to interoperate with Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet real-time market data platform, to send and retrieve data in real-time using multiple sources and destinations, taking advantage of the full multi-threading capabilities and power of today’s multi-core, multiple processor computers.

This advanced software is particularly important for developers of true real-time applications, such as algorithmic trading interfaces because it allows them, easily, to access, process and re-distribute data faster than before, meaning that opportunities for profit can be detected and acted on ahead of the competition. Other products and technologies can restrict applications to a single core or are unreliable under continuous heavy load conditions.

dna should be very attractive to hedge funds, arbitrage dealers and modellers with intense processing requirements, where speed of response is crucial. Also, less skilled developers with simpler requirements will appreciate the simplicity of the interfaces.

The software has been developed using advanced techniques with extensive automated unit testing [1] and continuous integration. Consequently it is extremely robust and can perform under extreme load conditions.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech and CEO of KTS said: “CityVision dna is easy to use allowing custom applications to be developed inexpensively and deployed more quickly. In the same way as genetic engineering strives for perfection, CityVision dna allows reengineering at the core of real-time systems to improve the performance and reliability, Naturally, it is compatible with all CityVision servers, so existing investment by our clients is protected and value can be added easily and rapidly.

“Its high performance is not only because DNA is thread safe[2], but also the internal code is highly multi-threaded, allowing DNA to take advantage of even the most advanced multi core servers. Scaling an application across multiple StarNet servers can provide even greater performance if required.”

The technical details and benefits of the CityVision dna system include:

* Two modes of operation supported across the entire range of objects, synchronous and asynchronous.
* Synchronous mode allows the majority of feed tasks to be written in one line of code.
* Asynchronous mode allows for dynamic real-time date reception.
* A clean concise interface, every object having the absolute minimum amount of properties, methods and events to be able to get the job done. The objects are extremely easy to code with.
* Common object structure, each object has the same structure as every other, so once the user learns to use one (which is easy) they are all the same to use.

1 A unit test exercises “a unit” of production code in isolation from the full system and checks that the results are as expected. The size of the unit may vary between a class and a package. The importance of unit testing has increased with the invention of ‘extreme programming’, a methodology introduced to reduce the cost of software development. In this approach, a developer should write unit tests even before writing the actual code.

2 A piece of code is thread-safe if it functions correctly during simultaneous execution by multiple threads. In particular, it must satisfy the need for multiple threads to access the same shared data, and the need for a shared piece of data to be accessed by only one thread at any given time. (Source Wikipedia).

01/01/2008

Knowledge Technology Solutions plc (“KTS”, “the Company”) Completion of the acquisition of Arcontech Limited Admission of New Ordinary Shares to trading on AIM

16 January 2008, Berlin / London: BÅ¡rse Berlin announced today that it has selected KTS Plc, a leading provider of real-time market data solutions, to develop and provide ongoing hosting for the Web Portal giving online access to real-time market data to be produced by BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading at the launch of its new pan- European trading platform ETS. The system will be accessible via the BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading website from April 2008 enabling users to view the Equiduct VBBO (Virtual Best Bid/Offer). Pre and post trade data from its Hybrid and PartnerEx market segments will come online in mid 2008.

“We have chosen an established market data vendor for this project to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and to enable us to concentrate on providing the best quality exchange services for our participants. We have found a partner who will be responsive to our evolving needs and one with whom we can work together to enhance and build a truly beneficial source of data for our clients.” says Rob Brouwer, Chief Information Officer, Equiduct Systems.

Andrew Miller, CEO of KTS, comments: “The financial markets are evolving rapidly to include many non-traditional execution venues. KTS supports the innovation of firms like BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading by providing tailored solutions for the consolidation and display of market data along with a managed hosting service.”

“BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading will be an important venue resulting from the regulatory changes introduced by MiFID. Our selection is evidence of our strong positioning and ability to address these and other large scale opportunities. As the first commercial project to use both Arcontech’s low-latency middleware and KTS’s proven flexible, browser-delivered display technology, it represents an endorsement of our strategy to combine these two businesses. We are delighted to be part of this venture.” adds Miller.

Artur Fischer, Joint Chief Executive Officer, BÅ¡rse Berlin adds “We believe that the Equiduct VBBO will become the European benchmark price as part of each investment firm’s equity best execution policy. The full depth of the virtual book, from which the VBBO is derived, will be used to calculate volume weighted execution prices as part of the PartnerEx segment of the BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading market thus differentiating Equiduct VBBO from other consolidated data feeds.”
About BÅ¡rse Berlin Equiduct Trading

Bšrse Berlin has consistently aligned its service offerings to the requirements of modern exchange trading. Trading foreign shares is its specialty. The foreign share- market was developed in the mid-nineties and has been continually extended. With the majority stake in Equiduct, Bšrse Berlin starts a process of newly positioning itself. The aim is to use the opportunities that the European Directive in Financial Markets (ÒMiFIDÓ) offers.

For more information please visit http://www.boerse-berlin.com

About Equiduct Systems

Equiduct Systems will provide the first MiFID-compliant, integrated pan-European single point of connectivity for trading services through the regulated market operated by BÅ¡rse Berlin. Equiduct’s unique market model addresses the four key requirements of best execution, enabling guaranteed execution at the lowest cost and at the best price with less than 10 milliseconds turnaround time.

For more information please visit http://www.equiduct.eu
About KTS

Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC is a leading provider of real-time market data solutions. KTS has been established in London’s financial district, the City, since 1999 and is a public company listed on AIM, a market operated by the London Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: KTS). In 2007, KTS acquired Arcontech Ltd., a specialist in real-time market data distribution and trading systems as part of its strategic initiative to provide enterprise level systems for the financial markets.

For more information please visit http://www.ktsplc.com and http://www.arcontech.com